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He drank and relapsed into his peculiarly close manner of silence. The thought of a mankind as numerous as the sands of the sea-shore, as indestructible, as difficult to handle, oppressed him. The sound of exploding bombs was lost in their immensity of passive grains without an echo. For instance, this Verloc affair. Who thought of it now?
Ossipon, as if suddenly compelled by some mysterious force, pulled a much-folded newspaper out of is pocket. The Professor raised his head at the rustle.
"What's that paper? Anything in it?" he asked.
Ossipon started like a scared somnambulist.
"Nothing. Nothing whatever. The thing's ten days old. I forgot it in my pocket, I suppose."
But he did not throw the old thing away. Before returning it to his pocket he stole a glance at the last lines of a paragraph. They ran thus: "AN IMPENETRABLE MYSTERY SEEMS DESTINED TO HANG FOR EVER OVER THIS ACT OF MADNESS OR DESPAIR."
Such were the end words of an item of news headed: "Suicide of Lady Passenger from a cross-Channel Boat." Comrade Ossipon was familiar with the beauties of its journalistic style. "AN IMPENETRABLE MYSTERY SEEMS DESTINED TO HANG FOR EVER. . . " He knew every word by heart. "AN IMPENETRABLE MYSTERY. . . . "
And the robust anarchist, hanging his head on his breast, fell into a long reverie.
He was menaced by this thing in the very sources of his existence. He could not issue forth to meet his various conquests, those that he courted on benches in Kensington Gardens, and those he met near area railings, without the dread of beginning to talk to them of an impenetrable mystery destined. . . . He was becoming scientifically afraid of insanity lying in wait for him amongst these lines. "TO HANG FOR EVER OVER." It was an obsession, a torture. He had lately failed to keep several of these appointments, whose note used to be an unbounded trustfulness in the language of sentiment and manly tenderness. The confiding disposition of various classes of women satisfied the